Alcohol can influence how well your best friend sings at the karaoke bar, but could it also change a bird's song?
New research suggests birds "slur" their songs after ingesting a stiff drink, NPR reported.
"We just showed up in the morning and mixed a little bit of juice with 6 percent alcohol, and put it in their water bottles and put it in the cages," Christopher Olson, a researcher at Oregon Health and Science University told Arun Rath of "All Things Considered." "At first we were thinking that they wouldn't drink on their own because, you know, a lot of animals just won't touch the stuff. But they seem to tolerate it pretty well and be somewhat willing to consume it."
Finches are often used as models to study how humans learn languages and communicate them to one another; in this recent study the team looked at how alcohol affects these birds' ability to "speak."
"Speech impairment is one of the most intriguing and least understood effects of alcohol on cognitive function, largely due to the lack of data on alcohol effects on vocalizations in the context of an appropriate experimental model organism. Zebra finches, a representative songbird and a premier model for understanding the neurobiology of vocal production and learning, learn song in a manner analogous to how humans learn speech," the researchers wrote in their study abstract.
The birds reached a blood alcohol level of between .05 and .08 percent, but this level is much more significant than it would be in humans because these animals metabolize it differently.
After ingesting the alcohol Olsen found the birds' songs were "a bit less organized in their sound production," NPR reported. The researchers found the birds exhibited "decreased amplitude and increased entropy" after ingesting the alcohol. These effects appeared to occur independently of altered behavioral patterns, which were not observed in the subjects.
In the future the researchers hope to determine how alcohol influences the birds' ability to learn new songs. The findings were published in a recent edition of the journal PLOS ONE.
